Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

$1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

blog.google

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 547 posts

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#131

Post by Retra »

lowdose wrote: post #38
CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #2

Most major tech companies want to hire onsite, when there are plenty of places in this country where you can buy a lot of real estate for much cheaper than the Bay Area. I pay less on my mortgage for a large house with over an acre of land than friends of mine pay for rent for studio apartments in San Francisco or Seattle. Investing $1B into housing in the Bay Area seems nice at the surface, but maybe if we stopped d…

We read a lot about the SF real estate market, wonder if it would be possible to dredge up a couple of Islands like the palm island in Dubai.

Those islands are wasteful, expensive, frivolous, and ecologically disastrous. They are not something to take pride in or repeat.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#132

Post by nova22033 »

>This will enable us to support the development of at least 15,000 new homes at all income levels in the Bay Area, including housing options for middle and low-income families. (By way of comparison, 3,000 total homes were built in the South Bay in 2018)

This nails the root cause of the housing "crisis" in the bay area.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#133

Post by maxsilver »

chucksmash wrote: post #94
nugget wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The headline is misleading. In the article it says Google is rezoning $750 million worth of land (+ $250m in subsidies) from commercial to residential use, and making it available for private development. It wouldn't surprise me if one of the biggest problems for Google was retention of young talent driven primarily by prohibitively high housing costs. In that way there is an incentive for them to bring down housing…

> It wouldn't surprise me if one of the biggest problems for Google was retention of young talent driven primarily by prohibitively high housing costs. Well, it would surprise me :-) According to levels.fyi, a new grad at Google is clearing $180k/year all-in. Next tier, still not senior, clears $250k/year. That's more than $20k/mo pre-tax. Even at an outrageous $5k rent on a single income and with no roommates, you'r…

> Well, it would surprise me :-) According to levels.fyi, a new grad at Google is clearing $180k/year all-in. Even at an outrageous $5k rent

Is that really enough to afford to live? Is that housing cost accurate?

A programmer at Google making $180k/yr salary brings in about $9,315.58 in after-tax income (according to PaycheckCalculator). The average house within 10 miles of Google's HQ currently costs about $1.5 million dollars according to Zillow's current month averages. (That's $9,745/month in after-tax costs per month, assuming 0% down on 30yr mortgage).

Like, maybe if you are single and live off of ramen and you pick the shittiest housing you can find, those numbers can work. But I personally couldn't afford to live in California on that salary (despite it being, under normal circumstances, an amazingly high salary).

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#134

Post by chaostheory »

rconti wrote: post #92
caymanjim wrote: post #75

It's great that Google wants to increase housing, but is this really going to work? The housing shortage in the Bay Area is not a money problem. If it were possible to build 20,000 houses in the next 20 years, it would absolutely happen without Google's help. The problem with housing there has one simple cause: NIMBYism. SF doesn't want to allow taller buildings and denser housing complexes. It's vastly worse in the…

Have you seen the absolute explosion of skyscrapers/mid-rise condo buildings in San Jose, Redwood City.. Hell, even San Carlos and Menlo Park have quite a few higher density units going in. I'm glad there's more density, and it's near transit, for the most part. Of course, it will still increase traffic, but by going with density and near transit, it'll reduce the impact vs building more single family homes.

South San Francisco and Brisbane are also pushing higher density residential housing, with most new residential development in South SF near BART. If places like Palo Alto and Belmont did their part as well, housing inventory would be better. Palo Alto went as far as taking steps to proactively limit their local economy in order to preserve the status quo, and even forcing Stanford to expand into Redwood City instead of at home.

These little steps help, but NIMBYism is still holding back potential housing inventory.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#135

Post by q3k »

dymk wrote: post #53
CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do I understand your argument correctly? Effectively, what I'm reading is, "Because large tech companies do X, it's very important for everyone else too (including billion-dollar companies that don't do X)."

You're not understanding my argument correctly. I'm saying, in spite of it being cheaper to distribute their engineers and hire remote, they do not. These aren't companies run by incompetent people, and they're large enough to have some remote workforce, so they understand how remote workers compare to onsite with as few other variables changed. These companies hire onsite because it's important to be able to meet fa…

> These aren't companies run by incompetent people.

It's not about incompetence, it's about not willing to introduce difficult changes and admitting they are wrong. See: open plan offices.

There's tons of successful, fully distributed companies.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#136

Post by Fins »

sidlls wrote: post #69
CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That studio in San Francisco or Seattle comes with the opportunity of a high paying job at a tech company. ...and your high paying job mostly pays your landlord. If the same company offered the same job to remote employees for comparable pay, it'd remove the financial incentive to move to these cities. This would have a lot of immediate obvious benefits.

It also affords living an area with substantially better quality of life in many areas: diversity and opportunity (career, entrepreneurial, academic) being two important ones. Most places with an acre of land as you describe are rural and in areas with poor services, education, and other quality of life concerns.

That very much depends on the area. E.g. Chicago suburbs may not be quite as cheap as "get an acre of land" but you can absolutely have significantly better access to cultural, educational, academic, etc. opportunities than anywhere around SF for significantly less money. Pretty good career-wise, too, and the difference in salaries is less than the difference in cost of living.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#137

Post by svachalek »

davidw wrote: post #76
Tade0 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and face-to-face communication is very important to this job. For what purpose specifically?

Let's see - software development can take different forms. On one end you have work where someone gives you well defined specs and the tools you need, and you just go crank out some code on your own. That works well for remote work. On the other end there are plenty of software positions that require people who can understand and develop requirements, possibly by talking with disparate groups like customer support, f…

Cleanly isolated work that can be shipped anywhere in the world is like making plastic widgets, it's a race to the bottom in terms of wages. So as a general rule it's the messy, on-site, highly iterative and negotiated work that pays the kind of money no one is willing to believe on HN.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#138

Post by sjg007 »

danans wrote: post #117
thorwasdfasdf wrote: post #56

Bay area voters have made their intentions abundantly clear, in numerous elections and voting: they don't want growth. So much so, that local politicians even brag about how much housing developments they've stopped. Why fight such a huge uphill battle in trying to get housing in the Bay area? Wouldn't it be easier to start from a city or town outside of CA? or at least outside the bay area? Maybe somewhere in the mi…

> just west of woodside there's hundreds of square miles of completely undeveloped land The terrain in that area would make it quite difficult to build dense housing there - it's even steeper than the very hilly area that Woodside itself is built on. It's not that it can't be done, but it is far more expensive (think about the cost of adding infrastructure like water, sewer, etc), compared to building housing in an a…

That land is also protected so good luck. There is a lot of land on the coast too, but good luck getting anywhere. The East bay may be a better option. Build a Google multiplex over there and then a push for transbay Bart or something.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#139

Post by TulliusCicero »

rconti wrote: post #92
caymanjim wrote: post #75

It's great that Google wants to increase housing, but is this really going to work? The housing shortage in the Bay Area is not a money problem. If it were possible to build 20,000 houses in the next 20 years, it would absolutely happen without Google's help. The problem with housing there has one simple cause: NIMBYism. SF doesn't want to allow taller buildings and denser housing complexes. It's vastly worse in the…

Have you seen the absolute explosion of skyscrapers/mid-rise condo buildings in San Jose, Redwood City.. Hell, even San Carlos and Menlo Park have quite a few higher density units going in. I'm glad there's more density, and it's near transit, for the most part. Of course, it will still increase traffic, but by going with density and near transit, it'll reduce the impact vs building more single family homes.

There's no more space for more single family homes anyway there, so that's not even an option.

What IS an option is changing mandatory single family home areas to allow for "missing middle" housing, thereby reducing economic segregation currently present on most of the residential land. A lot of people prefer the current level of segregation, though, so it's a hard sell.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#140

Post by cbhl »

caymanjim wrote: post #75

It's great that Google wants to increase housing, but is this really going to work? The housing shortage in the Bay Area is not a money problem. If it were possible to build 20,000 houses in the next 20 years, it would absolutely happen without Google's help. The problem with housing there has one simple cause: NIMBYism. SF doesn't want to allow taller buildings and denser housing complexes. It's vastly worse in the…

I would argue that the causes in SF are more complex than you portray. For example, race relations and racism are a factor, which is why NIMBYism is so strong in the Mission. There's even a "no-fault eviction map" that is depicted on a mural there:

http://www.antievictionmappingproject.net/combined.html https://www.antievictionmap.com/mural-in-clarion-alley

I'd also recommend looking at Janet Delaney's photos of SoMa from when it was a predominantly black neighbourhood. 3rd, 4th and 5th Streets have been rebuilt, but at the expense of pushing out the people of color that used to call that neighbourhood home. Delaney's work has been on exhibit at the SFMOMA, and studying local art in SF can help one understand the factors that lead to local opposition to housing development.

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cam-sfmoma-... https://www.sfmoma.org/artist/janet_delaney/

This announcement isn't going to affect the overall narrative around housing in SF. It's just "let's build some houses next to one of our south bay campuses", which Facebook already did a few years back.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/02/08/facebook-unveils-new-...

Google's has also previously submitted plans to the city of mountain view that include houses on its land (not sure if any of these count towards the 20k number):

https://www.engadget.com/2018/12/09/google-mountain-view-dev... https://www.mountainview.gov/depts/comdev/planning/activepro...

Post reply on HN